3. Fix the Window Manager

When the Chromebook reboots, it won’t be able to start it’s window manager and we have to pick a new one. So press CTRL+ALT+F1 and log in with the user/user credentials and first install the new video driver:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-armsoc

Then I installed icewm:

sudo apt-get install icewm

I, then, made IceWM the default window manager by editing the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file and making it looks like this:

I rebooted one more time, and I was then able to login into IceWM without issues.

4. Fix Post-Update Issues

After I rebooted, my sound stopped working for some reason. The alsamixer settings were correct but it seemed like pulseaudio was messing up my sound, so I removed pulseaudio and alsa-base like so:

sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio alsa-base

and then I just re-installed the alsa-base package:

sudo apt-get install alsa-base

and then my sound started working without issues. Another issue I ran into was with my touchpad, the double tap and triple tap functionality was reversed (ie tripped tap was right click and double tap was middle click) not sure why. After messing around with synclient, I discovered the following settings fixed it:

5. Some keyboard tweeks

I wanted to use the volume up and volume down keys on the keyboard (they corresponded to F9 and F10), since I was using IceWM it was pretty easy. I just added the following into my ~/.icewm/keys files and they worked great:

This allowed me to modify the HeadPhone and Speakers volume with the keyboard shortcuts that I defined.

I also wanted to have the brightness keys work as well (those corresponded to F6 and F7). I tried the package xbacklight but it didn’t work. Later I found that the /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper worked without issues. So I wrote this quick script:

and if you pass in up or down it decreases or increases the brightness by 100. My max brightness was at 2800 so this worked out for me (you can check out the max brightness by running /usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-backlight-helper --get-max-brightness). Then I added the following to my ~/.icewm/keys file:

key "F6" /usr/local/bin/chbr down
key "F7" /usr/local/bin/chbr up

I also noticed that the keyboard button right below the “Tab” key (the Search Key) was functioning as a “Windows” Key. That is usually the “Caps_Lock” key, so I changed the mapping for it to actually be the “Caps_Lock” key. Initially I used xev to find out what is the keycode of the keyboard button and then I added the following to my ~/.Xmodmap file:

elatov@crbook:~$ cat .Xmodmap
keycode 133 = Caps_Lock

Another thing I noticed was the “Disable Keyboard While Typing” Option wasn’t working. Starting up the syndaemon fix the issue for me. Here is what I added to my ~/.icewm/startup file to start the daemon on startup:

elatov@crbook:~$ grep syn .icewm/startup
syndaemon -t -k -i 1 -d

Lastly, I didn’t have the “Delete”, “PageDown”, or “Home” keys. In ChromeOS the following keyboard shortcuts existed that helped me.

Page up Alt and the up arrow
Page down Alt and the down arrow
Home Ctrl+Alt, and the up arrow
End Ctrl+Alt, and the down arrow
Delete Alt and Backspace

You can see the full list here: To get this working we first need to install xbindkeys and xvkbd.